114
by BellatrixLestrangey
Summary: Goretober Day 28: Ritual. While reading through a textbook, Icy comes to realize that she had been a part of a dark ritual as a child.


There is a darkness in her soul that she can't get rid of. It is embedded so deeply. It took root so long ago and has since blossomed into some twisted and monstrosity. It is what fuels her natural inclination for evil. What predisposes her to have a taste for the wicked.

Icy tries not to think much of it.

Tries to keep the memories far away from her conscious mind.

It is better that way.

She flips through the pages of her assigned reading, a dismal, thousand page long venture into the world of ritual sacrifice. On nights like these she wishes that she wasn't in honors classes, that she could join the others in their one-hundred page long read about Earth's witch trials.

Instead she is combing through something much more tedious and has been told very firmly that she is to never try any of the things depicted within the book. That such things are too twisted even for a dark magic school.

"Remember, that there is a separation between dark magic and black magic." Zarathrusta warned. "Black magic is uncontainable evil. Unspeakable evil. Practice of it will result in immediate expulsion."

Apparently this is a history lesson and only that. With her lips pressed firmly together, Icy turns another page. This one has only an illustration; black and white with a splotch of metallic red. Snow swirls all around in the picture. The tundra is vast and blank save for two structures; a single oblong monolith, black in color and blasted and assaulted by the snow. There is a small crack in its center that seems somehow darker than the rest of the black. Before the monolith is a crude alter of silver-white stone. A wooden pole, jagged and uninviting, juts from the center. Much of the metallic red is splotched at the foot of the pole.

Icy flips the page.

Another illustration.

In this one, nude figures adorned with body paint and necklaces of bone are gathered around the pole with candles and daggers. A figure seeping with metallic red is bound to the pole by primitive rope.

Icy shudders and closes the book. She can't imagine why, she has never been squeamish about that sort of thing before. But something is familiar. So startlingly familiar about the image. About the monolith in particular.

She is almost through with the book and yet she doesn't want to pick it back up. Instead she takes to pacing and chiding herself for being so absurdly fearful for no reason.

"Finish the reading already?" Darcy asks.

"Not quite." She replies.

"Isn't it due tomorrow?" Stormy puts in.

"Two days from now." Icy corrects. "That's plenty of time."

Plenty of time that she knows that she won't use. That doesn't stop her from trying though. Thrice more that night, she tries to resume her reading. But every time her eyes land on that page she feels inexplicably sick. She wonders if anyone else is running into this problem. Ultimately, she decides that she has read enough to earn a passing grade anyhow, she can bullshit her way through the rest.

**.oOo.**

_The stars are haunting. They light up a vast expanse that swallows everything. That is too empty and too mysterious to be comforting. Icy has never seen the beauty in the cosmos. Looking up at them, she only feels deeply unsettled. _

_Yet the real danger is here._

_Here in the snow; a tundra as deeply vast as the sky above. _

_An oblong shadow falls over her, she can feel an evil so intangible and so pure, it oozes like thick silt. Her heart beats all too fast and she wishes to flee. Her horror is unbearable when she makes note of the scratchy rope digging into her skin. It doubles when she realizes how small her hands are; she is only a child. No older than a tween._

_She tries to freeze the ropes but she feels no magic in her veins. Her dread triples. She can see them now, in the distance, the flicker of candles. Dozens of them and they bob in her direction. A sense of knowing sets in. _

_She screams. _

_Their procession is dreadfully slow, they draw out her anxiety and allow her to see moonlight glinting off of their daggers. They don't wear masks nor cloaks, though she wishes that they would because their eyes..._

_They are so terrible. Somehow they display an emptiness much greater and darker than that of the stars above. She feels nothing but a great and ancient vilness. They chant in a tongue from an old and dead world. From a shadowed place. _

_Each syllable slashes dread into her mind as deeply as their words create physical slashes on her naked body. She doesn't know what their daggers are for. The crimson is stark against her pale skin and freezes almost as soon as it springs forward. That which makes an escape, pools around her feet. _

_The chanting comes to an abrupt stop. Tendrils of darkness wriggle around in their mouths. _

_Everything goes still. There had been no sound to begin with, but it somehow grows even more silent. The world is suspended like so. And then in a jump-cut flicker they are all upon her at once. The tendrils spring from their lips licking at her. _

_Consuming her. _

_She feels something leave her body, something she wants back. She craves it so terribly. There is a hollowness in her. A coldness more frigid than her powers and the tundra put together. She weeps for whatever it is that she lost. She weeps in pain and in impenetrable fear. _

_She feels a sharp pain, one of the tendrils has slipped into her chest. It fills in the hollow. But it fills it in with something bleak and poisoned. The snow around the sacrificial pole blackens. Her eyes blacken. _

_Blacken into the same unfathomable emptiness as the figures have. _

_Her body falls and with it, the daggers fall. Many of them in and out of her back. And what for? They have already taken something from her. They had already replaced that something with a sinister thing. _

_Yet they torment her still. _

_With her back well and ravaged, they step back. Her blood seems to flow up. Up and towards the monolith. _

_Into the crack. _

_The monolith spits it back in the form of a black-silver sludge. The sludge pours into the wounds. It is invasive and unwelcomed and leaves her skin feeling swollen and bloated. The sludge is too thick for her veins. It is too cold and yet it burns like lava. _

_Another scream tears from her throat._

**.oOo.**

And that scream carries into her abrupt waking. She is breathing heavily, tears running down her cheeks. She wipes them away before Darcy and Stormy could see. It is bad enough that she had screamed. Yet, she can't blame herself. It had been so vivid.

So vivid that she knows that it wasn't a dream conjured by hours of picking through black magic texts.

No. No, that book had coaxed forth a memory long repressed.

Icy stares directly in front of her and at nothing in particular. She isn't sure where to go from here. What to do with the rekindled memory. She hadn't know what it meant or why it had happened at the time of its occurrence.

She, with all of her newfound dark magic knowledge, still can't come up with any answers.

Though she understands that it, whatever it was, is what has left her with her evil tendencies. She realizes now that she craves the dark as others craved food. She needs shadows and evil to sustain herself.

Faintly she wants to get rid of the craving.

She thinks that she should go to Griffin.

"What are you screaming about?" Stormy grumbles.

"We're _trying _to sleep." Darcy complains.

"Probably woke several dorms over!" Stormy adds.

She ignores them. There is something that she needs to see. Something that she has to know. Agonizingly slowly, Icy rises and wanders towards the nearest sink. She crafts herself a sharp icicle and drives it into her wrist.

Stormy gives a cry of alarm.

"What the hell are you doing!?" Darcy shouts, grabbing at Icy's arm. But before she does, Icy catches a glimpse.

She doesn't know what she had been expecting, but red seeps from the wound in a steady and concerning flow. "It isn't black."

"What?" Darcy asks.

"It's not…" Icy trails off.

She supposes that it looks like she has lost her mind. And maybe she has.

"Page nine-hundred and eighty-seven." Icy mutters.

Darcy furrows her brows. She hears Stormy rifling through the pages. "Stop messing around and help me, Stormy." Darcy barks. The dark witch wraps Icy's wrist in thick, tight bandages that Stormy hands her.

Icy has gone quiet, she doesn't know how to process. She doesn't even know what she is trying to process.

"Come on." Darcy instructs, hoisting Icy to her feet. She doesn't support her own weight so Stormy steps in. The pair half-drag her from the dorm and down the hall. Before they leave, Icy catches a glimpse of the book. Of the page prior to the one with the illustrations. It bears the chapter name in big, bold, cursive lettering set at the center of the page;

"Chapter 114. Ritual: The Vessel."


End file.
